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Please Help Diagnose My Problem

To keep a very long story short, I built my computer right after x-mas with the specs below and imediately after the first boot there was some artifacting, It seemed to go away and all was well until a few weeks later when the artifacts returned in full force and I couldn't get them away no matter what I tried. I RMA'ed the mobo and the new one booted up fine, with no problems. Once, a week or two later there were some very small artifacts that were corrected by a restart. I turn on my PC today, and there was the worst case of artifacts I'd ever seen, starting right at the mobo splash screen. I tried restarting, clearing the CMOS, nothing. They're so bad I can't see what I'm doing.

I personally believe it's the mobo again, but lightning striking twice has me doubting. My memory has been checked and is error-free, so that's pretty straight. My HDD is a possible cuplrit, but I don't know if a bad windows install or failing HDD causes artifacts. . . but I'll probably be getting a cheap HDD soon to check out those venues (Windows reinstall/check if HDD is failing)

Any ideas as to what's wrong, prior experiences, opinions, ways to check what's wrong, suggestions for nice non-SLI PCI-E boards?
 
artifacting has little to do with nf3 mobo - unless agp slot is dodgy, but not likely on 2 mobo.
the fact that it went and came back possibly points towards bad or loose vid cable
unless i'm missing it - you didnt mention monitor

could be card not all the way down in slot
could be corrupted drivers - new 5.6 should be out in a few days
could be gpu overheating in hot case, or dead fan
could be overclocking abuse, either on card or cpu fsb
could be cold solder joint or bga contact on vdcard ram chips
could be bad card - bios corrupted - also look closely on card for burned devices

I highly recommend buying a real cheap PCI or agp vid card to use a tester for vid probs - i find having one invaluable.
my $19 SIS 305 PCI card always seems to work
 
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